Client Business Scenario

The client is a large publishing corporation with business interests in education, business information, and the financial services market. The organization is structured into multiple business entities serving different niche areas or geographical regions across the globe.

The corporation’s existing business information system is characterized by heavy use of Excel, a stand-alone budgeting and reporting solution, no structured workflow for routing budgets for review and approval, and a proliferation of reports and offline worksheets without any standardization across business entities.

CPM Program

Primary business objectives of the corporate performance management (CPM) program are to:

Provide the right information to the right users at the right time to support better decision making

Establish a platform to support management of metrics/scorecarding and analytical reporting

Provide access to detail-level transactional data as well as integration with other internal and external data sources to increase the value of the information

Increase transparency

Standardize reporting and planning structures where possible

Utilize driver-based planning and budgeting models

The CPM program was based on Cognos Solution on top of a core CPM data warehouse. All key financial data, including actual, budget, and estimate, resides in the DW. The DW is designed to integrate other internal and external source system data—such as human resources, revenue, etc.—in the future.

Cognos Planning Solution extracts data from the DW and other source systems to facilitate driver-based detail budgeting and the monthly estimation process, along with medium-range planning. The Cognos planning system acts as a source for budget and estimate data to the DW and existing ERP system.

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence works on top of DW for facilitating Web-based standardized reports, business entities, and provides ad hoc and self-reporting capabilities to business users.

Lessons Learned

Business sponsorship

Define clear vision and establish senior management sponsorship

Create and strongly communicate project road map in the organization

Team

Include both business and technology people in working project team, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities

Prepare organization to adapt to business process changes and standardization

Create data source ownership and understand business rules and cleansing logic for all data sources

Plan for holistic design and staggered rollout

Plan for iterative approach for design and development

Technology

Thoroughly test and establish an appropriate and scalable technology infrastructure

Design and test individual components of technology solution to ensure scalability and performance

Design and Build

Ensure that design assumptions are clearly communicated and reviewed by business owners

Establish and follow best practices for businesses processes and technology solution

Support

Maintain a common pool of knowledge resources and establish a process for knowledge sharing among onsite and offshore team

Ensure continuity by establishing a core dedicated team for the project

Outcomes

Established a reliable foundation of core data, reporting, and planning capabilities, including process improvements, testing technology solution, and creating an environment within the organization to leverage, use, and contribute to CPM solution

Established a transparent and integrated driver-based budgeting and estimation system

Standardized and automated budget workflow and approval process

Designed and built a standard set of core financial reports that can be used across business entities

Designed and deployed self-reporting capability that is based on preverified centralized data source

Established data set that can be leveraged for developing dashboards and designing KPIs